Waiting
by Robin Siskin
Summary: After all, there are people waiting for him. [Mangaverse, Havoccentric, No pairings unless you squint, drabbleish][Major spoilers for chapters 38 onwards]


**A/N** – Hmm. A bit longer this time. If you'll recall, in the manga Roy compares his struggle against Wrath to a chess game and says that his "knight, pawn, rook, bishop and queen" have been taken away from him. I haven't been able to find a reliable source online that says whether or not Arakawa-sensei intended to assigned each of these roles to a character, nor have I found associations that many fans agree with, so I took the liberty of assigning each character to a role myself. Goes like this:

**King –**Roy  
**Queen** – Riza  
**Rook** –Havoc  
**Bishop** –Breda  
**Knight** Falman  
**Pawn** –Fuery

This focuses on Havoc (of course), but I think it's necessary to see how I categorized the others to see that Havoc's position makes sense based off the way everything else went down. Cha. Oh, and I'll put a more "in-depth" view on this up on livejournal later. I didn't want to have a page long author's note!

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He's not Mustang's pet dog like Hawkeye is, but he's close enough to that position for it not to matter. They're all dogs of the military anyways. Being more loyal (at heart, at least) to Colonel Roy Mustang didn't change a damn thing about that. No matter how much all of them _wanted _to help him get to the top and _enjoyed _doing that by being his subordinates, they were still his dogs, pets or not.

And yet, the fact that he knows this and doesn't mind it, and in fact revels in the idea of helping Mustang get to the top (because really, he can't think of another person with the same ambition for or capability to change the nation that the good Colonel has), doesn't bother him as much as the idea that maybe he'll be unable to continue to do so. He has dedicated his life to the task for so long that he hasn't really thought of any other way to live it, and now, when it has become impossible for him to keep on playing the part of rook, all he can think about is how they'll manage without him.

He knows they care about him, and he knows that he wasn't _useless, _but no matter what he _knows_, he can't stop himself from feeling differently about it. He can't even feel his legs anymore, and like it or not, know everything or nothing at all, there's nothing he can do for them anymore. Even if he wasn't planning to retire, the only way he'd be able to get around was in a wheelchair (or crawling on his stomach, how fitting), and the idea of being useful to the Colonel while being wheelchair-bound or dragging himself along was laughable. Not just laughable, but absolutely ridiculous. If he mostly did deskwork like Hughes had, maybe he could have gotten away with it. But Jean Havoc was not the kind who sat and did deskwork all day. That was not how he helped people, not how he became useful. Jean Havoc was the rook, and the rook has to be available at the right times to open a path for the king whenever necessary. A man who is wheelchair bound cannot do that. A man who cannot use his legs cannot even run to save his own skin, let alone the life of another person.

Even though he _knows _that the rest of Roy and co. don't hold it against him, _know _that it's not directly his fault that he can't move his legs anymore the same way that he _knows _there was no way for him to associate his getting a girlfriend with something bad (someone asleep at their post in the heavens, maybe, but not because of some sinister plot on good old terra firma), he still feels as if he's letting them down.

"I'll be waiting for you at the top," Roy told him, as if he expected him to recover. And if it were any other person telling it to him, and Havoc was any other person than himself, he might have found it easy to just sit back and retire. But he is not the kind of person to just sit back and retire. He is not the kind of person to just give up. He can go through whatever he needs to go through to get the use of his legs back (like a certain illegal immigrant and certain blonde-haired boy had, he would probably go through whatever he needed to in the shortest time possible even if it meant vomiting up blood and overall agony), but that is not exactly the problem. It is not a matter of willpower or determination. It is a matter of the laws of nature, and by those laws he might never be able to walk again. He will do all he can to fight those laws, but scientifically speaking, it's next to impossible.

Oh, he has all those people waiting for him. His colleagues and friends and family want him to recover, and in a perfect world their desires combined with his will would make everything better. He would come back on some sunny afternoon (or some rainy evening), burst in a door where Roy and co. are grouped, thinking of him, and announce his complete recovery with a girl who smells like juniper and roses on his arm.

But it's not a perfect world.

The Elric brothers could have told you that. Hell, most people could have told you that. The laws of equivalent exchange don't always apply. Just because he loses the use of his legs doesn't mean that he'll eventually get them back, or that he'll even receive anything in exchange for that loss. Years and years of having no luck with women did not eventually give him heaps of luck; on the contrary, the first girlfriend that he got after having to dump what was possibly the first serious girlfriend of his adult life to be transferred to central with the Colonel stabbed him in the back (metaphorically and literally) and caused the whole damn mess in the first place. The laws of equivalent exchange have no bearing on life outside of alchemy. There is only hard work, and luck. And with Lady Luck, being a lady, never really choosing to grace him with fortune equipped to supply anything bigger than finding a bit of loose change in the gutter on occasion, for Havoc, there is only hard work and determination. And alone, hard work often has no effect whatsoever.

So, speaking from a purely scientific viewpoint, he is useless.

Not that he'd ever admit it. After all, there are people waiting for him.


End file.
